With the development of services, such as Internet, mobile network, digital television, and mobile multimedia broadcasting services, Push, which emerged earliest as a push instruction in the computer programming language, has developed to be a client/server mechanism-based technology in which a server proactively sends information to a client. Internet Protocol (IP) Push refers to an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)-based technology in which a server pushes a message to a mobile device through an IP network.
To enable a server to push information to a mobile device in real time, a connection is established between the mobile device and the server. If there is no push message exchange for a long time, the connection may be disconnected, and consequently, the push message cannot be pushed to the mobile device in time. Therefore, to keep stability of the connection, the mobile device needs to send a heartbeat signal to the server at intervals, so as to keep the connection in an active state. In the prior art, after a connection is established between a mobile device and a server, the mobile device sends a heartbeat signal to the server at a fixed time interval, that is, the mobile device sends the heartbeat signal to the server at a fixed frequency. If a time interval for sending the heartbeat signal is too long, the connection may be disconnected due to interference, such as network quality or a firewall, causing that a push message cannot be pushed by the server to the mobile device in time. If the time interval for sending the heartbeat signal is too short, the mobile device needs to enable a network constantly, so as to send the heartbeat signal to the server, which increases battery power consumption of the mobile device and increases network traffic of the mobile device.